Is there a way to steer the ship between these? Doing so would necessarily involve dissolving the question somehow. But the dissolution must take some form more sophisticated than "Whatever, this is pointless." Nor can it be some Wittgensteinian version of the same.

Perhaps: these are translatable, transposable. Each stands in a peculiar relation to the other. Can an illusion fall out of a construction, which is constructed from that illusion? No - neat and dialectical and all, but that just stands us at square one. It does not satisfy. It's not a ship we can sail on. There are waters, yes, but there must be a reason to sail.

Perhaps: neither is valid from the point of the other, but this need not bother us because we're not shackled to one or the other. We can move freely (flux) but any such move requires an antecedent reason (being). But, this does not satisfy either. Just a glorified description of change disguised as progress.

Perhaps: we cannot put everything into one box. But, we are free to require some globalizing/universalizing apparatus to justify any move from flux to being or back. We need not globalize the same way every time. But, what does "globalize" mean here? I could say that it means we demand some context besides "useful for this one thing right now." But this requires a substantive ethics to make sense of. And without that, we're marooned again.

Puzzling.

What I mean is: in the first case, permanence is apparent because it always goes away after a while, no matter how permanent it looks. Whereas, in the second place, change is an illusion because it was never there to begin with.

Good question. If everything is flux, you make stuff out of the flux, although the permanence of the stuff you make is never true permanence. But if everything "just is," then any change is only apparent. That choice of words was very deliberate.

Then I can't help you.

Read the post.

Refusing to answer the question basically means shallower depth of consideration with regard to time, i.e. refusing to reflect on the issue in a philosophical manner.

In my stillness, I experience flux, in my variation, I see permanence. Each needs to assume the other as fundament.The same eye sees the hands of the clock move, and the ever-changing self sees always the same present. Don't make me choose. — unenlightened

Interesting. What happens if I put on my transcendental idealist hat?

Time is the form of our internal intuition, says Kant. My consciousness of my apperceptive unity as mine happens upon reflection, because I become conscious of the manner in which I am affected by my own reflection, but only as a posterior consequence, giving rise to the timeline whereby I organize my experiences.

The data stream would appear to be pure flux, if anything, although ultimately noumenal. The source of the form of intuition that I impose on it would appear to be eternal and static because necessary, although that too is noumenal, or at least, its source is.

I don't even know what either of these statements are saying. It seems like they make some substantive claims about reality, but when I try to nail these claims, they just slip out of my hands. — SophistiCat

Think Heraclitus and Parmenides. Unless this is a lead up to saying that both are nonsense, in which case we can just go outside and play golf or something.

I know, right?

It's kind of fishy. :wink:

To state what a belief is, you have to put it into a sentence with a subject/predicate form. So whether or not beliefs are propositional, you have to say them in so they sound as if they're propositional.

Rejecting the myth of the given is presupposed by the article - that's what foundationalism is. — Banno

Huh?

If you're going to dismiss the discussion in that way, then his original comment about elaboration on experience isn't necessary to begin with. Analyzing it that way is what invites the Sellarsian response.

When you see your hand and are prompted to believe that your hand exists, the contents of that belief are an elaboration upon the details of the experience that prompted it. — Pfhorrest

Myth of the Given.

Math can deal with infinities. To say that math has it wrong is silly. You need the concept of infinities to do things like derivatives and integrals, and you need those in turn to do physics, which is empirically supported. The physics works and the physics is based on a mathematics of infinite, so we can't act as if math is wrong about infinite. It's not.

A big problem is heterogeneity.

Some people rise from the ashes of their failure. Some people get knocked down by the smallest setbacks. There's no corresponding material, no analogy, because people are too different from one another.

Analytic philosophy is just industrialized thinking. Robots will do it better in a few years.

Another way forward might be to find an instability within the enframing concept that sees humans within nature, or as always already inhuman. Human mastery over nature, seeing it as instrumentalised for us, invites a reverse position where we're (1) nothing but one type of its instruments and (2) thus have a duty of care for that which we're coextensive with. — fdrake

The whole thing seems to come around to a reassessment of priorities. I know I don't want techno-dystopia, and I know that certain human impulses lead directly to techno-dystopia, so I have to find a reason to keep not-wanting techno-dystopia besides the humanism that pushes us in that direction. A holism that includes us as part of nature is a step in that direction, but I sense something fundamental missing from this perspective. I suppose what I want is for our naturalness to coexist with our dignity, or at least not be at direct loggerheads with it.

Fantastic post! Thanks for clearing up that part of the problem space. I guess the question is, once we return to the concerns of dasein, what will we hope to have gained from our romantic excursion into Being?

Shouldwe focus on which one is realer and more effective, or on which one is worthier or more meaningful?

For what it's worth, I am in much the same situation as you are. And while I do not think that the solution for me personally is the same as the solution for humanity, they must be at least related, because I am a human.

Heidegger points out, in a moment of self-awareness, that you cannot treat technology as devilish because doing so is essentially falling prey to technical thinking. The question is, what integrates the inner monkey with the inner monk?

Heidegger captures something about us, perhaps. Marx is probably helpful too. Our practical behavior is more abstract these days. Quality is quantified. Perhaps I make low-quality or ugly things because they sell when I'd prefer to make quality or beautiful things. Maybe our dreary practical situation is especially ugly in some way lately, but it's hard to imagine being saved entirely from unromantic compromise. — jjAmEs

It's true that there are plenty of sighing Romantics who would love to sit around and pine for ages past, and it's true that Heidegger has some of that tendency. But dismissing his observations on those grounds is falling prey exactly to his criticism. This isn't about reaching eco-utopia, it's about avoiding techno-dystopia, which is a real danger right now. If you don't believe me, look at how China is presently governed. Ask yourself what happens when we're basically data-cattle for social media and government.

I can understand the temptation to say, "Whatever, stop living in fairy land. The world has always been ugly and we've always had to scrape the muck off of our boots." The issue, however, is the social consequences of a culture that no longer has a reason to scrape the muck off of its boots; what argument can be mustered against e.g. dystopian governmental policy, if there is no transcendental 'why'? Refer to my first post.

This does not mean some final articulation where there can be no further analysis, a completed metaphysics of some kind.

Okay, cool. I'll riff on that a little.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy, because full disclosure exposes philosophic thinking to enframing. Heidegger's thought is a dead end however because it sees no way out for thinking. The "new" kind of thinking he proposes is too garbled; in flight from enframing, he runs straight into the abyss.

I think there is more to it than a vague spiritual sentiment, however. We are in a bind because enframing, as the ultimate practicality, cannot be argued with on pragmatic grounds. In no concrete situation will you ever be able to argue persuasively against enframing because enframing can always establish its superiority by pointing at the numbers. In the big picture this turns everything (including us) into standing-reserve, but that vague, metaphysical, wishy-washy fru-fru spiritual-sounding claptrap can never be convincingly employed against a concrete instance of Gestell. That only works when you can posit a hard ethical limit, and those are increasingly hard to come by. Nothing seems to serve that purpose, or at least, nothing that can stop overcome the present and lead us into a post-technological age.

This is precisely the sort of reaction that Greta's parents would like her to provoke. If I have a political statement to make, and I have a child do it in the most controversial manner possible, I can guarantee a backlash. Which then makes my opponnents look like horrible people, attacking a child of all things.

Someone should also have offered the white person who thinks that their whiteness is harmful to others a cyanide pill and advised them to "do the right thing". — Bitter Crank

That's the interesting part. People are willing to say all kinds of absurd things in the name of social theory, but seem unwilling to follow those statements to their logical conclusion.

Of course, if you rationalize enough, you can make this sort of thing sound reasonable - that works on anything. Better to just ignore it, though.

Chinese Muslims aren't being persecuted. Uyghurs are. There are historical reasons for this.

Precisely. Mathematics is mind-dependent because it's not useful to say that it isn't, and "utility" is a worthwhile measuring-stick here because mathematics is mind-dependent. It begs the question, and you can see this as soon as you ask why "utility" should matter here.

Mathematical Platonism is either true, or it is not. Why would utility help us answer that question?

I'm afraid that wasn't an argument.

Ah, so you do have an argument! What is it?

I'll take that as a "no."

Do you have an argument?

Terminology is not terribly important. Instead of complaining that I'm being mean to the paper, why don't you respond to the argument?

Ah! I see the problem here. Platonism is a stance toward the reality of abstractions, so argument against Platonism is argument against the reality of abstractions. Thus the reason for bringing up the reality of abstractions.

I pointed out that your argument is circular. Do you actually have a response?

Okay, so how does my picture have little to do with reality? We need something better than question-begging here.

"I don't care if it's real or not; I'm not interested in reality." Well, okay, then.

So his argument is that the Platonic world of math doesn't exist because it is... uninteresting? :lol: — litewave

Lots of irrealists about math make this argument. "Well, it's not useful, so these abstractions aren't real." Of course, the reality of an abstraction would only depend on its utility to us if the abstraction were not independently real to begin with. Argument begs the question, everybody go home.

Okay, but that makes the KK principle vacuous.

"S knows that P" -> "S knows that S knows that P."
"S knows that S knows that P" -> "S knows that S knows that S knows that P"

This seems like such a basic point that I'm sure proponents of the KK principle have thought of it, but what's the reply? How does this not imply that, in order to know something, I have to know that I know that I know that I know... ad infinitum? And what would that mean? If it's supposed to be intelligible that I can know that I know something, then the whole regress should be intelligible, right?

I suspect that this misses the point somehow, that someone who holds the KK principle would mean something totally different by it. Is the second K a different kind of knowledge from the first K?

Thinking about it here, what is lurking behind my objection to this reasoning seems to be Hume's guillotine: that one cannot derive an ought from an is. So my objection is that one cannot go from the claim "being is intrinsically good" to "therefore, one ought to procreate." — Thorongil

If Being is intrinsically good, then Hume's Guillotine fails. In fact, Hume's Guillotine basically is a denial of the idea that Being is intrinsically good.

My take on it?

Would you take out $40,000 in loans to take a vacation for "personal enrichment?" No? Then why are you getting a fucking humanities degree?

As an addendum to my prior post, I will note that, in tension with my distaste for skeptical pretense, I have a certain suspicion of "commonsense" philosophy. There is no in-depth philosophy that does not do violence to common sense...

I have often thought that skepticism, given its typical rhetorical purpose in philosophy, can be profoundly misleading. It's all well an good to discuss evil demons and brains in vats, but when we refuse to admit that we don't actually doubt certain things, we get into trouble. I'm thinking of a quote from Peirce here....

You can sense the coyness when a professor says, "What? I have no way of knowing that I'm not dreaming right now..." which is fine, but he doesn't doubt for a moment that he's awake.

You said I cannot trust your source unless it's backed up by a left-wing source. — Baden

No he didn't.